Deeplinks Posts by Jennifer

In 2018, we learned that expanded biometric surveillance is coming to an airport near you. This includes face recognition, iris scans, and fingerprints. And government agencies aren’t saying anything about how they will protect this highly sensitive information. This fall, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) published their Biometrics...

The Trump Administration’s “zero tolerance” program of criminally prosecuting all undocumented adult immigrants who cross the U.S.-Mexico border has had the disastrous result of separating as many as 3,000 children—many no older than toddlers—from their parents and family members. The federal government doesn’t appear to have...

So why do we know so little about it?The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is quietly building what will likely become the largest database of biometric and biographic data on citizens and foreigners in the United States. The agency’s new Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology (HART) database will...

A version of this article first appeared in the Daily Journal on May 22, 2018. When you share your DNA with a private genealogy database, it’s not only potential relatives searching for matches. The Golden State Killer case shows that law enforcement—and others—may be searching...

EFF has joined the ACLU and a coalition of civil liberties organizations demanding that Amazon stop powering a government surveillance infrastructure. Last week, we signed onto a letter to Amazon condemning the company for developing a new face recognition product that enables real-time government surveillance through police body cameras and...

Do you use Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, or T-Mobile? If so, your real-time cell phone location data may have been shared with law enforcement without your knowledge or consent. How could this happen? Well, a company that provides phone services to jails and prisons has been collecting location information...

We filed an amicus brief in a federal appellate case called United States v. Ackerman Friday, arguing something most of us already thought was a given—that the Fourth Amendment protects the contents of your emails from warrantless government searches. Email and other electronic communications can contain highly personal, intimate...

In a disappointing and deeply divided opinion released today, the California Supreme Court upheld a state law law mandating DNA collection from arrestees. A lower court had held this law violated the privacy and search and seizure protections guaranteed under the California constitution. Today’s decision lets this flawed law...

State agencies in California are collecting and using more data now than they ever, and much of this data includes very personal information about California residents. This presents a challenge for agencies and the courts—how to make government-held data that’s indisputably of...